


Pancakes, Bacon, and Everything in Between

by igrockspock



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comfort Food, Friendship, Gen, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 14:52:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1861959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov have eaten together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pancakes, Bacon, and Everything in Between

**1.**  
Natasha awakens to the smell of frying bacon and realizes she doesn't know where she is. There are heavy footsteps in the kitchen -- a man's -- so she doesn't open her eyes. Is she on a mission? Did she fuck someone last night so she could kill him over breakfast? No, that's not right. There had been a mission, but she hadn't completed it. She'd gone home with someone, but nobody had had sex and everyone was alive.

She opens her eyes, and Clint Barton puts a plate of bacon and pancakes on the coffee table in front of her. She takes in the tattered curtains and cracking paint, the tacky picture on the wall that probably conceals a weapons cache or a safe. It's a safe house. A SHIELD safehouse.

"If you're not going to eat the bacon, let me have it before it gets cold," Barton says, and Natasha picks up a slice even though she's not hungry. She's not anything -- not tired or scared or hopeful or dead. Last night, she had been Natalia Alianova Romanova. Today she is no one and nothing.

"I didn't figure you for the domestic type," she says, just to say something.

Barton shrugs. "Had to cook if I wanted to eat. When I was a kid, I mean."

Natasha weighs the statement and its implications. No parents. No one who cared if he ate. Did he pick her up because he thought she was like him? She wasn't. She had parents, and they loved her. It didn't stop her from becoming who she was.

She pokes the pancakes with a fork. " _So_ American," she says. 

"I know," Clint says. He sits in the chair across from the coffee table, a breakfast plate in his hands. "I make SHIELD keep pancake mix in all my safehouses."

Natasha files the fact away: find pancake mix, find Clint Barton. He's so vulnerable right now -- both hands occupied, his holster empty, his knife laying on the cutting board in the kitchen. She could take him, if she wanted to. She's not going to, but knowing that she could counts for something.

"Why did you make me these?" she asks, swallowing a mouthful. The syrup is the fake kind, caramel-colored sugar water. The sweetness of it makes her teeth ache.

"To be nice," Barton says, smirking. "Get used to it."

 

 **2.**  
Clint eats orange peels and apple cores. Natasha saves bacon grease and chicken bones. She makes salads out of beet greens and radish tops, bitter things that no one else wants to eat. Clint sometimes reaches into the fridge, sinks a spoon into the mustard or the mayonnaise jar, and eats it plain. She understands not wasting food, but eating condiments is just weird.

The fifth time she sees him do it, she asks, "Why?"

Clint shrugs like it's nothing, but she can see embarrasment in the faint hunch of his shoulders. "When I was a kid, sometimes beer and mayonnaise were the only things in the fridge."

Natasha tries to imagine satiating her hunger with a jar of Miracle Whip and can't. Life before Red Room had been hard, but not that bad. There's something soft and vulnerable in Clint's face, something she hasn't seen before. He doesn't do this on missions or in the SHIELD lunchroom where people might see; she's the only one who's allowed to know. Trust like that demands a confidence in return.

"Red Room seduced me with a strawberry," she says. "I'd never seen anything that ripe and red and beautiful before." When she'd been born, the Aral Sea was already receding. She grew up with dust in the air and seashells crunching underfoot, rusted fishing trawlers looming in the distance. The carrots they pulled from the earth were thin and twisted, more yellow than orange. What they tried to grow above the ground died. She was nine years old when a man in black offered her a strawberry in exchange for her soul. At the time, she'd thought she was getting a good deal.

Clint regards her steadily. The kitchen in his apartment is small -- barely a meter between stove on one wall and the sink on the other, and not quite long enough for her to lie down on the floor. It's a claustrophobic place for telling secrets.

"Is that why you keep throwing my strawberries away?" he asks. He doesn't look disgusted, and Natasha feels the tension go out of her shoulders. She goes back to cutting the carrots.

"Yes," she says.

He grins crookedly, one side of his mouth rising higher than the other. "I'll stop buying them then."

 

 **3.**  
Natasha wakes up to find Phil looming over them. He looks warm, she thinks -- nice and warm in his puffy SHIELD coat and standard issue field gloves. Unlike certain assassin-spies who might have slept on a flat stretch of high-altitude pastureland in Kyrgyzstan.

Phil squats down and pokes Clint, who wakes up looking vaguely indignant.

“What the hell are you two doing out here?” Phil asks. “This is not the pick-up point.”

“Nat cried about some yogurt balls,” Clint says, his voice still muzzy with sleep.

“I didn’t _cry_ ,” Natasha says. She looks at Phil because surely he knows she would _never_ cry over something as stupid as food. “And they weren’t really yogurt balls.”

Phil looks skeptical and confused, the same way he looks when Clint and Natasha say that setting lots of things on fire was the only way to complete the mission. “If they weren’t yogurt balls, what were they? And more importantly, why does that mean you slept outside ten kilometers from the rendezvous?”

“They were yogurt balls,” Natasha concedes. “But they were made of horse’s milk and they’d been buried in the earth for a month. And it’s a long story.”

“It’s not that long,” Clint says. “She ate one, and then she cried.”

“I didn’t _cry_.”

Clint ignores her and leans closer to Phil. “Tears were rolling down her cheeks.”

“Because I was _gagging._ You were lucky you didn’t taste them first, Clint.”

“Hey. _I_ wouldn’t have gotten us kicked out of the yurt.”

“You got kicked out of a yurt?” Phil asks.

“Because Nat here couldn’t keep her yogurt ball down. Apparently, it was the finest thing the Kyrgyz shepherds had to offer. They were very offended.”

“It’s not my fault. Listen, Phil, these things tasted like vomit rolled in dust. They stuck in my teeth and I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t. It just didn’t seem...healthy.”

“And so the perfectly nice nomads kicked us out of our nice warm yurt, and we slept in the pasture.”

Natasha shrugs. “Shit happens. The important thing is, we didn’t freeze to death and the KGB didn’t find us. Right, Phil?”

 **4.**  
Infiltrating Phil’s civilian funeral is easy. He’d kept the standard-issue SHIELD cover story, the one about working in military intelligence. It made sense for Phil: he had been a Navy SEAL before he joined SHIELD, after all. It’s easy to drift among the guests, murmuring that she had met him when he liberated her village from Chechen terrorists.

At least, she thinks it’s easy. Clint is following behind her, muttering disapproval at her every word. Finally, she steers him into a quiet bathroom and locks the door.

“What is your problem?” she snaps.

Clint looks incredulous. “ _My_ problem? You’re the one telling people that Coulson saved your kitten from terrorists.”

“It’s a nice touch,” Natasha says. She halfway believes the story herself. She was seven years old, standing on her porch with a kerchief on her head, petrified by the sound of gunfire drawing ever closer. She shouldn’t have even come outside, but what little girl wouldn’t have wanted to save her cat? Suddenly strong arms closed around her. She had cried out, but when she’d seen his eyes, she’d known he was kind. Then he’d bent down and scooped up the kitten and he’d carried them both to safety. Years later, when she finally escaped her village for good, she’d joined the American Navy. Tracking down the man who’d saved her life took the better part of her decade, but she hadn’t given up until she found him and thanked him. It was an _excellent_ story.

Clint is still staring at her, his eyes asking _are you fucking insane_ like he can read the story on the inside of her head.

“Why are you acting like this isn’t true?” she asks. “It’s not like Phil _didn’t_ save children from terrorists.” Maybe not in Dagestan -- Navy SEALS on Russian soil would have started World War III -- but the essential facts of the story are true, even if the details aren’t.

Clint’s eyes soften, and Natasha presses her advantage. “Phil was a hero. You know that. The people out there don’t, and they deserve to.” She takes a step closer. “And you know he saved me. Let me give his mother a story to make her proud.”

Clint leans back, letting his head hit the wall with a dull thud. “You and I should have _nothing_ to do with normal people. You know that, right?”

“And yet, here we are,” Natasha says. She twists the doorknob. “Come on. People are going to think we’re having sex in here if we don’t leave soon.” 

They don’t stay much longer after that. It’s a long drive back to DC, and they’d promised Hill that they’d be back by midnight. The sun is fading from the sky when Clint pulls over at a park and retrieves a white cardboard box from the backseat of the car.

“Did you _steal_ something from the funeral?” Natasha asks. Her morality is fairly flexible, but even she knows that’s wrong.

“Nah,” Clint says, settling on a picnic table and opening the box. The aroma of peanut butter wafts out. “There were, like, twelve pies and Phil’s grandma said to pick one. So I did.” He whips out two plastic forks and a pile of napkins triumphantly. “See? She even gave us something to eat with.”

Natasha ignores the fork and breaks off a piece of the crust. It flakes apart on her tongue, leaving behind the taste of butter. Clint digs into the pie with indecent haste, not even bothering to cut it into slices. Natasha drags her fork down the middle, leaving behind a neat, straight line.

“Don’t fuck up my half,” she says. “I’m saving it for later.”

"You know how SHIELD funerals are all vodka and drinking games?" Clint says, and Natasha nods absently. She rarely attends memorial services, even for people she cares about. Her grief is private.

"When it's my turn, skip the vodka and make a bunch of pies," Clint says. There's a faraway look in his eyes, and Natasha knows he's imagining a long line of pies spread out in his honor, with jewel-bright fillings and flaky crusts.

"Shut up," Natasha says, carving a cube-shaped bite from the middle of her pie. "You know I don't cook, and more importantly, you're not going to die."

 **5.**  
SHIELD falls, and Clint is alone in Abkhazia, waiting for an extraction team that's never coming. Natasha retrieves their emergency bag from the DC safehouse, buys a ticket on a commercial airline, and prays the Feds haven't put her on the no-fly list yet. The journey will take at least thirty-two hours, but Barton's a big boy; he can manage a day by himself.

Hill is waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. "Do you have weapons?" she asks, and Natasha rolls her eyes.

"You can't take those on commercial aircraft," she says, and Hill's eyes widen. Natasha knows what she's thinking: this is their new reality, keeping the world safe with nothing but their wits and whatever's available on the open market.

"Then what's in the bag?" she asks, gesturing at the plain black duffel dangling from Natasha's shoulder.

She shrugs. "Hair straightener. Pancake mix. Socks and underwear." All their agreed-upon essentials for life on the run.

They stand awkwardly on the safehouse steps. 

"Well," Natasha says. It seems as good a way as any to end a decade-long relationship of efficient cooperation marred by occasional distrust.

Hill nods. "You'll be able to find me if you need me," she says, and Natasha takes it for what it is. Not an apology for doubting her, or for passing that doubt onto Fury, but an acknowledgement that whatever their personal differences, they're fighting on the same side.

"Thank you," Natasha says. She walks out into the darkness, ready to retrieve the one thing she wants to save from her life with SHIELD.

She taps out a text on her burner phone: _Hold on, pancakes are coming : )_

It's their code for _everything is fucked, but I'm coming to save you_.


End file.
